Well, Should it be ? perhaps, it would be coherent: the same links everywhere :)

The main purpose for mod_rewrite is for SEO, that being the case search engines will not be using this section of the site.

Consistency is deabtable but the most valid reason I could think of to mod_rewrite that section of the forum would be to hide the underlying technology used, now because this is an open source forum this point is very much irrelevant.

Search engines will never use the search feature so pages will never be cached, that rules out the use of mod_rewrite as a method of ensuring that site ranking is not lost with name changes.

So the only real benefit you will gain for creating mod_rewrite on the search is user friendly urls and consistency.

Asking myself is this needed, at present I say no. I might change this view in the future, but as it stands today with SEO and the capabilities of mod_rewrite it really is not needed.

I fully agree to realitybytes. Search results in miniBB should not be cached by search spiders (and they won't be reached in any case), as about Statistics page... it is more informative for community users, not for search spiders.

The only problem comes when users use search function and use that not-friendly link to reference from somewhere else. That means that while you got nice url_rewrite, your effect from the backlinks is very diminished. Backlinks are much more important than nice url's for seo results. Anyway, I realize on many forums, that's not worth the bother, yet some could benefit from it nicely, especially those "authority ones", with lots of quality content.

Just one little question, why does the link in the forum link to index.php? and not just to the forum root or index.php? Couldn't the ? be a little problematic for search engines?

Definitely. Same problem. Some backlinks point to your root, some to /index.php?. Same content but two different url's for a search engine. It means that instead of getting all the power to one point, you get some of it to each of them, but not combined.

Regarding search function - always remember that search spiders are indexing only AVAILABLE content, and available only for anonymous users. Search spiders can not index any of search page results at all - just because they won't "enter" some search phrase automatically and then call that page. Everything they might index - search form page itself.

Search engines consider these two to be different pages. In today's "world of links", if you point one to the first and second to the second, it will not bring you that high in search results, as if you would give both two links to the first (or to the second). (Simplified reasoning.)

Not even speaking here about duplicity issues (will search engine count the first link?, because obviously if the second url is indexed, it might consider it duplicate content), as I am not well versed in them.

The point is in watering down the power. If you get two links to page x, will get you better search engine results for that page, than if you get one link to page x and another to page y.

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